You would keep the secrets in ya' - you be keeping paraphernalia

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

10/11/17 : As You Were - Liam Gallagher


Our third visit with Liam solo and our second visit with a Gallagher in a month - expectations are not high, but Noel managed to pleasantly surprise me, so you never know.

Actually, this starts with "Wall Of Glass" which I knew I liked but I thought it was a Beady Eye track, so we're already ahead of the game. And taken, a track at a time, the rest of the album is decent enough (the singing isn't always great, but in other places it's way better than expected) - but there's not a huge amount of variety so I think you have to be a certain type of person to want a whole album of it. If you are that type of person, I'm sure you've already got this album so you'll be happy - it doesn't quite hit the spot for me but, and I can't stress this enough, this could have been far, far worse.

We're all the way down at #8 in the charts this week on his fifth week of a frankly incredible 46 week run with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week - I'm not sure it's entirely worth of such adoration. The top five this week were Sam Smith (a new entry), Roy Orbison with the RPO (another new entry), Alfie Boe & Michael Ball, Ed Sheeran and P!nk, with the next highest new entry being Sheridan Smith (#9) with, to no-one's surprise, an album of show tunes.

Wikipedia tells us this is his debut solo album and doesn't give us an awful lot more other than telling us some pretty hot producers worked on it - Greg Kurstin (who won the Grammy award for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical in this year), Andrew Wyatt and Dan Grech-Marguerat (who I'd never heard of but he's worked with a LOT of people). Critically, the album was received pretty well, making a few best-of-year lists - #10 for NME and #37 for Rolling Stone. And commercially, it did pretty well getting to #4 in Italy, Spain and Switzerland and #1 in Ireland - and even #30 in the US, which seems decent for the lad.

discogs.com tells us you'll have to spend a couple of quid if you want a good CD version but if you want the box set consisting of fifteen single-sided 45 rpm 7" vinyls then it's going to set you back £260 - I will not be buying that because it all sounds like a dreadful faff (oh, and it's £260). To put it mildly, I'm not Liam's biggest fan but I'd say this is a pretty decent stab at an Oasis album (which is something Oasis themselves didn't manage to do all that often) and "Wall Of Glass" is a fine track that I was pleased to be reminded of. 

03/11/17 - Interestingly forgettable
17/11/17 - Misses the mark more than usual

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